PRAISE FOR KATE MORETTI
The Vanishing Year
“A woman’s perilous past and her affluent present converge in Kate Moretti’s latest jaw-dropping thriller. Replete with unsavory characters, buried secrets, and a bounty of unexpected twists and turns, The Vanishing Year is a stunner. A perfectly compulsive read that’s impossible to put down.”
—Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of Don’t You Cry
“The Vanishing Year is a chilling, powerful tale of nerve-shattering suspense. Kate Moretti pieces together a stunning, up-all-night thriller with a throat-gripping twist that will leave the reader reeling.”
—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of Missing Pieces
“Great pacing and true surprises make this an exciting read. Fans of twisted thrillers featuring complex female characters will devour Moretti’s latest.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Moretti maintains a fast pace . . . chillingly satisfying.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fans of S. J. Watson, Lisa Unger, and Sophie Hannah will enjoy this fast-paced psychological suspense novel.”
—Booklist
“The Vanishing Year is dark, twisty, edge-of-your-seat suspense. I read it in a single sitting and enjoyed every word. I highly recommend it!”
—Karen Robards, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Time I Saw Her
“The tantalizing plot twists layered atop the juxtaposition of the protagonist’s troubled past and the opulence of her current life not only are intriguing but will keep you reading The Vanishing Year far into the night. Well done, Ms. Moretti, well done!”
—Lesley Kagen, New York Times bestselling author of Whistling in the Dark and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing
“The Vanishing Year is more than an engaging tale of utter betrayal. It’s an intricate dance of realities, full of twists and turns you won’t see coming. Kate Moretti has outdone herself. You’ll miss your bedtime, guaranteed.”
—J. T. Ellison, New York Times bestselling author of No One Knows
The Blackbird Season
“Crime fiction adores girls in trouble. Moretti’s latest nail-biter is no exception, but it is exceptional . . . Though Moretti’s emotionally astute tale can be heartrending, readers won’t be able to look away. As slow, creeping dread sets in, so does the inevitability of the terrible situation the town finds itself in, offering a deliciously sinister glimpse into the duplicity of small-town lives and the ease with which people turn on each other when tragedy comes calling. Moretti’s tale of jealousy and obsession is nothing less than dark magic. Witchery indeed.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A powerful story about a missing girl and an accused suspect that takes a haunting look into the characters and relationships you think you know. The Blackbird Season explores the fine line between guilt and innocence, truth and perception, the moments that break people apart—and those that bring them together. Riveting and insightful, this is a book that lingers long after you turn the final page.”
—Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls
“This cautionary tale keeps the reader guessing to the end.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The tale’s suspenseful core should catch and hold most readers, especially Gone Girl fans.”
—Booklist
“Kate Moretti’s insightful, starkly human mystery about a girl they call ‘witch’ has that sit-down, gotta-cry eloquence readers long for. Mean-girl alliances and small-town loyalties collapse in unison on the day the blackbirds fall. This story will hold you tight to its pages well past your bedtime. The Blackbird Season is Moretti’s best yet.”
—Lisa Turner, Edgar Award–finalist author of The Gone Dead Train and Devil Sent the Rain
“The Blackbird Season pulls off a very difficult thing: it’s nail biting and thought provoking all at once. It’s rare that a book can make you turn pages like your life depends on it but also give you food for thought because the characters are so perfectly drawn. A stunning achievement from an extremely talented writer.”
—Gilly Macmillan, New York Times bestselling author of What She Knew
“Moretti spins a tale of suspicion, deceit, and dreams that die as suddenly as a flock of starlings falling from the sky. A thrilling morality tale of the highest order, The Blackbird Season will make you question the lines between right and wrong, victim and criminal, and the unknowable intentions that form our innocence and guilt.”
—Mindy Mejia, author of Everything You Want Me to Be
“A skillful blend of family drama and domestic suspense . . . it kept me turning the pages and was resolved to my satisfaction at the end. Highly recommended.”
—Eileen Goudge, New York Times bestselling author of Garden of Lies
“Moretti begins The Blackbird Season with a sinister premise—a cloud of birds falls from the sky on the same day a teenage girl people call ‘the witch’ goes missing. A spellbinding tale of long-held secrets and small-town scandal, The Blackbird Season is one of those stories that sneaks up on you, each chapter building steadily to an ending that will haunt you long after you turn the last page.”
—Kimberly Belle, bestselling author of The Marriage Lie
In Her Bones
“Morbid . . . Moretti pulls some tricky tricks when she sends Edie on the run, where she slips in and out of some neat disguises and suffers just enough to satisfy the most judgmental reader.”
—New York Times book review
“Heightened language takes In Her Bones to a higher level than the standard thriller. Readers will enjoy this book for the suspense and plot twists but love it for the skill and mastery Moretti has for her craft.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Captivating . . . Fans of twisty psychological thrillers will find plenty to like.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Kate Moretti is incredibly talented! In Her Bones is at once chilling and compelling, frightening and insightful—and truly, madly, deeply satisfying. You’ll gasp at every twist, and you’ll turn these hauntingly sinister pages as fast as you can.”
—Hank Phillippi Ryan, nationally bestselling author of Trust Me
“Kate Moretti’s In Her Bones is a suspenseful, whirling spiral of mysteries within mysteries, plot twists you won’t see coming, and characters linked by deadly fates that stretch across the years. Moretti’s prose is crisp and masterful, her people rich and real. Don’t miss this haunting, wild thrill ride.”
—David Bell, author of Somebody’s Daughter
“Reading In Her Bones is like watching a true-crime documentary . . . And you seriously won’t be able to put it down.”
—HelloGiggles
“A masterfully crafted, multilayered novel . . . Kate Moretti manages to cover all the angles, making the story deep and dynamic . . . In Her Bones is complex, honest, and heartbreaking. It is much more than merely a mystery and is well worth reading.”
—Bookreporter
“Sensational—a stunning psychological thriller that kept me riveted from the first page to the last. A dark and compelling exploration of what it’s like to grow up with someone who just may be the worst mother in the world, Moretti’s chilling and insightful novel answers the question: If your mother is a serial killer and you’re obsessed with her victims, what does that make you?”
—Karen Dionne, internationally bestselling author of T he Marsh King’s Daughter
“Suspense at its best: a chilling voice, an unlikely heroine, a haunting story. In Her Bones is Kate Moretti at the top of her game.”
—Jessica Strawser, author of Not That
I Could Tell
“We dived headfirst into In Her Bones, its riveting twists and turns keeping us up well past our bedtime. Moretti has meticulously crafted this gripping mystery, which begs the question: Is it possible to escape our own fate? Another stellar contribution to the suspense genre.”
—Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, authors of The Good Widow
OTHER TITLES BY KATE MORETTI
Thought I Knew You
Binds That Tie
While You Were Gone (a Thought I Knew You novella)
The Vanishing Year
The Blackbird Season
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Kate Moretti
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542000086
ISBN-10: 1542000084
Cover design by Christopher Lin
To Lily and Abby, who almost died to help me research this book. I’ll admit it wasn’t my finest parenting moment, but really, you’re fine. And I hope we have many, many more adventures together.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
September 2, 2001
I didn’t mean to kill the girl.
I found her skulking around the woods, hiding behind trees, darting behind the shed.
Hey, I called. Dizzy with panic when I saw who it was. I waved the shovel in her direction. I’d been turning over the compost.
I said, You aren’t supposed to be here.
My voice wasn’t nearly as strong as I’d hoped. I’d hoped to frighten her away. I sounded meek, terrified.
Oh, that’s right. I’m human garbage, she spat. I came to give you something!
She had a folded envelope, shoved it roughly into the pocket of my jacket.
It gave me a shock, really, that she would put her hands on me. Such defiance for someone so young. But then, she wasn’t that young anymore. How old was she? Sixteen? Seventeen? She’d be striking out on her own soon. Too pretty for Rockwell, not quite pretty enough for the city.
No human is garbage, I said. I tried to reason with her; truly I did. She carried so much anger inside her. Some people were just born angry.
She said hateful things: You never cared for me. You treated me like I was nothing.
None of that was true, of course.
After everything I’d done for her. How could she be so hateful? I’d done so much for her. I’d tried more than anyone. Even after.
Well, not after—I’ll be the first to admit that. But who would?
It’s time to go home, I yelled, and I was ashamed at how my voice shook. I was afraid of her.
I tried to hurry her along, despite the swell of adrenaline, so consuming that my vision blurred. I tried to breathe through the anger.
She wouldn’t leave me alone. She rushed at me, a wild thing, hair a tangled sight.
I wasn’t proud of the fact that my heart had hardened. I wasn’t proud that I’d run out of love for this lost girl.
I took the brunt of all her problems, you see? That night was a culmination of all the things that had ever happened to her, and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She yelled and ranted: You never forgave me. No one did. I was ruined.
I stood there and took it all, shoulders squared, legs solid. Absorbing her hate and her hurt and her words. Until.
Say something. Anything! She begged me to talk.
But I didn’t reply to any of it. Felt the mounting, growing rage deep in my gut. An anger I’d never known. A helplessness I couldn’t fathom.
You know what? I did it, she whispered right in my ear.
The rage overwhelmed me, and I closed my eyes and swung and felt the shovel in my hand connect with her skull, and she fell to the dirt, and oh God, there was a lot of blood, but it pulsed out onto the wet leaves, absorbed by the earth, and I watched her tremble and sputter out her last breath in a matter of seconds.
I didn’t mean to kill her.
But after it happened, I wasn’t sorry.
Not for a long, long time.
CHAPTER TWO
Now
August 15, 2019
The call came in shortly before midnight, as they mostly did. Huck slept like he was dead, but the buzzing phone gradually woke Hannah, first becoming part of a recurring dream. Hannah held a garden shovel; she was digging a hole, the dirt sifting over the metal, a feeling of dread deep in her chest, her shoulders aching. The smell of something rotting, soil and death, leaves and worms. Then, suddenly, the spade was a cell phone.
“Hannah Maloney?” the voice on the other end asked, soft and clipped.
“Yes. Hello.” She woke instantly, the number unfamiliar, a 607 exchange: New York. And she knew it all right away, like a vision. (Except not truly; she always had to clarify, if only to herself.) She nodded, her legs swinging over the side of the bed, before the voice on the other end even said the words: car accident.
She shook Huck awake. “We have to go. I have to go.” They didn’t have a polite relationship. They had a bathroom-door-wide-open-while-reading-the-obituaries-aloud relationship. Huck felt, at times, like an appendage: firmly attached, essential. It was natural for her to wake him at the first hint of disaster. It was equally natural for him to assimilat
e, even while half-asleep.
The woman on the phone said, “You were listed in her phone as ‘in case of emergency.’”
At the same time Hannah said, “I know.”
Hannah thought, What about Stuart? Is he alive?
She asked the woman on the phone about Aunt Fae’s husband.
A beat of silence, the faint rustle of paperwork before she came back on the line. “There was only one person in the car, dear. Your aunt Fae.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Hannah’s voice, to her own ears, sounded breathless, like she’d run miles. Her brain ticked through a frantic to-do list. The phone to her ear, she looked for her sneakers under the bed, then in the closet. She motioned to Huck to get up, and he nodded.
Rink, their Irish setter, stood alert at the panic in her voice. She patted his head, then stopped moving. “Does Uncle Stuart know? Does her husband know?” She imagined Uncle Stuart, what she’d seen in movies of people dying of cancer: gaunt figures under bedsheets in dark rooms. Raspy breathing. She’d heard from her mother, a year and a half ago, that the cancer had spread. She assumed he was still alive, assumed she’d be informed if he wasn’t. But who would have informed her? Her mother was dead, and Aunt Fae hadn’t spoken to Hannah since she was fifteen.
She imagined Uncle Stuart waking in the morning, no breakfast, no Fae, confused and hungry.
“We will send an officer to the house,” the woman said. “Is there a caretaker who has keys?”
“No. Fae is the caretaker. There’s a nurse who comes daily for meds. Or at least there used to be. I don’t know what time, though.” Hannah stuffed jeans and T-shirts into a bag. Huck was just standing up and flicked on a bedside lamp. She sat down, light headed. Too much, too fast.
“How long will it take you to get here?” The woman’s voice had softened, become kindly.
“I’m in Virginia.” She’d never driven to Rockwell from her new town. Their new town, as Huck gently reminded her every day. They were a “they” now. She stopped, took a few breaths. She wasn’t alone anymore. If you were lucky, fiancés were built-in assistants, therapists, and financial advisers all rolled into one. Hannah was lucky.
She did the math: three hours from Pennsylvania, plus three more.
“About six hours, I’d guess.” The woman on the other end beat her to it. A pause. “You should leave now, dear.”
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